favorite films of 2014

Last year, I realised that my favorite films were characterized by “real people with real problems.” Man, I’m fickle. This year, as far as reality went (my family, work and relationships), I just couldn’t even go their. Instead of 2013’s actual people, my favorite characters were children’s toys (The LEGO Movie), superhero aliens (Guardians of the Galaxy), and vampires (Only Lovers Left Alive). Instead of 2013’s refigured documentary techniques, it was the pulpy techniques of genre filmmaking — both in style and subject matter — that dripped down my list, starting with my honorable mentions (The Guest, The Rover) and ending in a pitch-black puddle at my #1.

The takeaway, if anything, is that it was a great year to watch movies, whether at the cinema, the indie art-houses, or on Netflix. I couldn’t even fit all of my favorites on this list, so read the names of these honorable mentions before moving onto the love below: Interstellar, The Rover, Frank, Starred Up, Mr. Turner, The Guest, Maps To The Stars, Locke, Two Days One Night, Edge Of Tomorrow, Joe, Leviathan, Citizenfour, Life Itself, What We Do In The Shadows. 

Click here for The Thunder Review year end list.

20. Cold in July
Dir. Jim Mickle
[IFC Films]

Mickle borrows the visual tropes of 1980’s B-movies to adapt Joe R. Lansdale’s noir novel set in a small town Texas during the same time period. In the film’s opening sequence, Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) creeps through the hallways of his suburban home, washed in blue nocturnal light, as he fatally shoots a masked burglar. When the dead man’s father (Sam Shepard) begins stalking Richard’s family, the simple case of self-defense escalates into a more complicated series of events that bend the genre from neo-noir to a revenge film. This fusion of genres finds its representative in the character of Jim Bob (Don Johnson), flamboyant cowboy farmer/private investigator. The use of throwback cinematic style intends to match form to function as a means of deconstruction in the film. Set in the 80s as a critical examination of societal cracks, Mickle evokes the sleazy thrillers of the time period to examine the underpinnings of violence and corruption in American culture.

19. Ida
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski
[Music Box Films]

Rather than the dramatic theatrics that the film’s interaction of characters may suggest, Pawlikawski’s approach is self-disciplined and almost muted (even the romance is dealt with deftly), exuding a sense of spiritual quietness with a purity and finance that is rare outside of a Robert Bresson or C.T. Dreyer film, yet with a political and moral undercurrent that this type of story demands. Its compositions are often fragmented, with close-ups capturing only a portion of Ida’s face or placing her at the very bottom of the frame as if her sense of self is dominated by the world around her while the soundtrack, only once interrupted by a brief spurt of sound, is wonderfully spaced, the emptiness filled either with natural sounds or brief interludes of classical or jazz music (most memorably John Coltrane’s “Naima” in its most tender moment and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony ironically in its most depressing) played by the characters. This minimalist approach is not only suitably thoughtful, but allows the films dramatic moments hit with a crashing finale and the emotional weight of Wanda to clash so wonderfully with the composed honesty of Ida. 

18. Calvary
Dir. James McDonagh
[Fox Searchlight]

To say that this comedy was as black as a pint of stout would be correct, but it’s nothing like a full account of this film’s depths. It opens in a confession booth, with a confession of a sin to come: “I’m going to kill you, Father.” This made Father James (Brendan Gleeson) go forth into a search for answers, both for the mystery surrounding his fated end and for his mistakes of the past. He was the good priest who must die because nobody would miss a bad one, and the excellent performance given by Gleeson was such that you believed in his character’s goodness, even after glimpses of a life lived less Godly. His parish was altogether more sinful, populated by strange, rackety characters (those other Irishmen of the moment, Aiden Gillen and Chris O’Dowd) radiating sociopathic levels of eccentricity. Like his previous film The Guard, McDonagh explored clichés of Irishness and did his best to destroy them. But by the film’s shattering end, he also did a great deal to renew them. As black as a pint of stout, then, but with a hint of something else. Cyanide, perhaps. Or even holy water. An Irish film, anyway.

17. Nightcrawler
Dir. Dan Gilroy
[Open Road Films]

Here’s a recipe for a Nightcrawler: one half Taxi Driver, other half The King Of Comedy, a sprinkle of Collateral, and a dash of American Psycho. Chug straight from the mixer (who has time for pouring a glass in this dog-eat-dog world of the media and news machine?). Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut became ever so close to a invective tone, but it thankfully avoided crashing into cheesy territory as it examined Louis Bloom, the frightening yet fascinating newsman on a quest to find his talent and achieve success by any means necessary. Yes, there was media commentary as loud as Peter Finch’s “Mad as Hell” speech in Network. Yes, there was a grimly uncomfortable sexual power dynamic at play with news director Nina (Rene Russo, Gilroy’s wife), who espoused the “it bleeds it leads” mantra that Louis exploited with exact precision. But at the center was Jake Gyllenhaal, who was more charismatic and arresting than he’d ever been in his career. While Denis Villeneuve’s one-two punch of Prisoners and Enemy got me on the Gyllenhaal bandwagon, it was Nightcrawler that left no room for outside skeptics of his talents.

16. 12 O’Clock Boys
Dir. Lotfy Nathan
[Oscilloscope Laboratories]

Just from watching The Wire, I would imagine that being raised in Baltimore’s west side doesn’t give you many options. When almost everyone around you (other than the police) is either broke, deep in the drug trade, or imprisoned in the massive city jail, freedom is at best an elusive quantity. Enter the 12 O’Clock Boys, a group of teens who ride dirtbikes and ATVs in large gangs through the city, angling for an ideal, 90-degree wheelie as they fly at incredible speeds. Director Lotfy Nathan’s explores the life of these riders through the eyes of Pug, a pre-teen 12 O’Clock aspirant and animal lover, never scared at the legal and physical danger innate in the group’s activities, deepening our fascination at the thrilling spectacle while still transmitting a certain darkness. But more importantly, the film captured a child’s dream of freedom and the relentless drive he summoned to realize it. With profound euphoria and extreme empathy, 12 O’Clock Boys gave me what few have ever been willing to grant the residents of Baltimore’s toughest streets: the struggle not just to survive, but to live.

15. Only Lovers Left Alive
Dir. Jim Jarmusch
[Recorded Picture Company]

I have watched probably every Jim Jarmusch film there is, and I have come to notice that his whole filmography is just one antihero, morphing through different identities and circumstances, reconciling themselves with a surreal but darkly comic world. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; add some vampires. Only Lovers Left Alive marked Jarmusch’s first venture into fantasy and, in particular, a genre hung upside down and drained to death over the past decade. What was remarkable here wasn’t how OLLA (lol) differed from its contemporaries in the vampire genre or the fact that Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton might’ve been the most androgynous people ever filmed (apart from Bowie), but how Jarmusch infused his signature modern-man problems into the centuries-old lives of bored monsters. Switching between Tangiers and the desolate city of Detroit, Only Lovers Left Alive followed the lives of the things going bump in the night and how bored they were with everything. Plus: John Hurt as Christopher Marlowe. John Hurt as Christopher Marlowe in Ray-Bans. Medieval pimpin’.

14. We Are the Best!
Dir. Lukas Moodysson
[Magnolia Pictures]

If there was another movie this year that injected as deep into the spine of teenage experience and angst as We Are the Best!, I didn’t hear about it. And if there was, I would have a hard time hiding my affection for this one. Three girls from 1982 Stockholm defined cool with their compulsive exuberance of noise and subtle anarchy. Beginning with long talks on the phone whining about their parents, a simple idea (Let’s start a band!) ended up to a basement bashing session. With new-wave at its peak, their mission was to raise hell and piss off the naysayers. And by they end, they did. Loose, angry, and relatable, the performances in We Are the Best! are remarkably mature and affecting. They would have overshadowed everything else if the film wasn’t so strongly coherent.It’s a film full of joy and mischief. The girls made one song, an imperfect gem, punk at its core: “Hate the sport! Hate the sport!” Those three words encapsulated everything that made this film great: humor, passion, and bad haircuts.

13. Nymphomaniac
Dir. Lars von Trier
[Zentropa Entertainment]

This year I witnessed the long-awaited Nymphomaniac, Mr. von Trier’s two-volume, softcore porno and a satisfying conclusion to his Depression Trilogy (following Antichrist and Melancholia). At the forefront was none other than his regular muse, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who was strangely captivating as Joe. The narrative consisted of Joe relating to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) the travails of her sexual odessy through flashbacks from childhood to the present, punctuated by Seligman’s struggle to understand it all. Joe navigated the experiences of her younger self (graphically and strongly portrayed by Stacy Martin), in the iterations of the progression/digression that became her nymphomaniac identity. Von Trier’s casting of Christian Slater and Shia LaBeouf seemed to be a wink of sorts (as her father and primary fuck buddy, respectively): LaBoeuf’s presence was especially annoying and excessively frontal, and I wanted more from standouts Uma Thurman, Jamie Bell, and Willem Dafoe. But it was fine, because the film thematically encompassed more than an exploration of sexual addiction, analysing the intricacies of sadomasochism, psychosis, primal jealousy, and the political social views of gender; all intertwined with my unrelenting and insatiable efforts to extract meaning from it all.

12. Obvious Child
Dir. Gillian Robespierre
[A24 Films]

Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child succeeded in two great accomplishments in one film: it announced Jenny Slate as a strong actor to watch and, more importantly, turned in a great romantic dramedy surrounding the topic of abortion. The film wasn’t a criticism or social tirade, nor did it joke about the subject matter facetiously. Instead, Obvious Child talked about different aspects of love, modern adulthood, and the implications of parenthood and abortions with self-confidence. As written by Robespierre, the film was as light and hilarious as could be expected while doing an impressive balancing act by being sensitive to the realistic decisions I would imagine women face. It helped too that the actors turned in performances perfectly in keeping with the tone of the film: they were sad without being pitifully sad and hilarious without being superficial or zany about it. But above all else, Slate’s performance and Robespierre’s film were affably human.

11. Gone Girl
Dir. David Fincher
[20th Century Fox]

Gone Girl — David Fincher’s third consecutive adaptation of a best-selling novel following his take on the story of Facebook and a girl with too many tattoos — continued the his trend of injecting right into the zeitgeist while sacrificing none of his typically biting wit and existential anxiety. It was a more intense, often funny, and scathing satire than any he had made before, and its brilliant perversion of the lie of not only the happy marriage, but also nearly all interpersonal interactions cut deep into the core of how we, in the 21st century, related to and presented ourselves to one another. Even down to the casting of Tyler Perry so blatantly against type, Fincher immaculately portrayed the massive differences between who we are and who we let others believe we are. The whole film was wonderfully whacky in a sense, playfully shifting moods from comedy to bizarre to appalling, and occasionally all three at once, playing like a 21st-century Blue Velvet, where everyone had a bit of Frank Booth in them and where even a happy ending comes with heavy air quotes and a wink. Some have unimaginatively seen the film as misogynistic, but it was resolute in its skill to keep everyone in the crosshairs. Gone Girl was a purely misanthropic dish served cold at a 5-star restaurant that was ultimately hurled right into my face. All I could do was laugh in disgust.

10. Goodbye to Language
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard
[Wild Bunch]

I wonder what new ways films aging troublemakers find to fuck with us? When word came that Jean-Luc Godard’s new film would be shot in 3D, my first worry was that he would pander to the novelty of the format. Instead, Godard’s budget approach to 3D allowed him to emphasise the contrasts that engulf Goodbye to Language colliding with and rejecting one another. Godard’s visual world became both absorbing and bewildering, as he followed his dog through a forest or trained his lens on the unforgiving 2D road beneath his feet. The film’s frustrated narratives appeared between scattered waves of sound and light; his characters shrugged and shat their way through heady tautologies, typically naked and mumbling about the old standbys: sex vs. death, infinity vs. zero. At times, the film would grow restless and walk away from itself, a technical feat that allowed me to alternate between two different films by closing either eye. What few threads of story were on offer quickly gave themselves over to uneasy moods and explosions of noise. Goodbye to Language proved to be an adequate title; the film’s credits list philosophers and composers alongside actors and cameras, an incomprehensible crowd of influences and ideas to compute with. Goodbye to Language is Godard distilled: a film dense with the cryptic taunts of an aging radical.

09. Blue Ruin
Dir. Jeremy Saunier
[RADiUS-TWC]

It’s tough to make a revenge flick without endorsing revenge. Hard as a film might try to be critical, to make clear that this is not the right way, it’s easy for the audience to become the revenge-seeker as the runtime marches on and the tension mounts. Blue Ruin didn’t entirely succeed at defusing that bloodlust for me, what with its clumsy, kind of awkward protagonist who just happened to want to murder the man who killed his parents. How the film succeeded in providing more than violent wish-fulfillment was by inverting that mounting tension. Instead of simmering the anger, Jeremy Saunier used his film’s many quiet stretches to drain the puss of revenge’s wound, leaving its central character and audience asking important essential questions: Why am I doing this? And is this worth it? Am I just making it all worse? Blue Ruin spent much of its final moments stewing in those questions, in the midst of rural beauty that suggested both tranquility and the dark edges of American wilderness, before delivering a final blow. Once it was reached, the blow felt inevitable, but it didn’t feel good for anyone.

08. Guardians of the Galaxy
Dir. James Gunn
[Marvel Studios]

James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy opened with a young boy seated in a dark hospital corridor, his eyes closed, listening to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” on a Walkmen. He sat, lost in momentary euphoria for a few seconds, before being shaken out of his stupor to the reality of his mother’s imminent death from cancer. This brief moment essentially gave us the whole film in a nutshell, as Guardians of the Galaxy was nothing if not an escapist science fiction fantasy that, despite its hilarity and special effects, was at its core a film about insecurity, loss, and death. As we watched Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) ride into deep space, along with his gang of low-life crooks and criminals, the film delivered its own promise: a journey to the stars to forget the real world for a couple of hours. And despite the mega-effects and big action scenes, Guardians was a science fiction film where the most pivotal piece of technology was an old cassette player. So with one foot in the stars and one foot firmly on painful planet Earth, Guardians of the Galaxy invited me to put on headphones, close my eyes, and let the fantasy temporarily take me away.

07. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
Dir. Ben Rivers & Ben Russell
[Rouge International]

Yet again, recent years in cinema proves its greatest strengths are in materialist filmaking, but in the case of the wondrous A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, spare and languid quasi-documentary images of water, trees, communes, and black metal were steered toward incantatory rather than descriptive ends. Starring Lichens’ Robert A.A. Lowe, this elliptically moving ode to stasis and movement both social and physical eclipsed the previous work of both co-directors, reinvigorating slow cinema and morphing hipster iconography and neo-New Age references into something vivid and powerful. Perhaps the first film to grasp black metal on an aesthetic level, it was a sustained roar into the ether and a triumph that earned its weirdly literalist title.

06. The Raid 2
Dir. Gareth Evans
[Sony Pictures Classics]

Sequels shouldn’t be this good. Following immediately after the events of The Raid: Redemption, The Raid 2 followed rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais) as he went deep undercover to expose police corruption in the underworld. This setup provided writer/director/editor Gareth Evans with more than enough ammunition (and knives and hammers and other harmful things) to craft a crime epic that was more developed in terms of characters and themes than its predecessor, but WHO  THE FUCK EVEN CARES. What really mattered was that the fights were bigger and better, and that there was a heap of new set pieces (that muddy prison-yard brawl!) and characters (Hammer Girl, Baseball Bat Man), not to mention an incredible car chase — in short, everything a successful sequel needs to justify its existence. So despite operating in familiar territory and utilizing well-worn tropes,  The Raid 2 remained engrossing throughout the entirety of its staggering 150-minute runtime. It seems contrived and lazy to use superlatives and sweeping generalizations in a year-end list, but what the hell: The Raid 2 was one of the best action films I’ve ever seen.

05. The LEGO Movie
Dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
[Warner Bros.]

If I’m being honest, the “awesomeness” of The LEGO Movie might be exaggerated in relation to how low my expectations likely were for it. A film based on a bunch of plastic building blocks sure seemed like a dead-on-arrival proposition. Yet writer/directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller wound up with a smart, witty, action-packed movie that spoke directly to the creative spirit of their source material and that not even an uneven, cheesy live-action sequence could ruin. All of those positive qualities became even richer thanks to some eye-exploding computer animation and pitch-perfect voice acting work by Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett (greatest Batman in movie history btw), and an especially ridiculous Liam Neeson. Apparently a sequel is in the works, which has me instantly suspicious. But, again, that might work to Lord and Miller’s advantage, as they could wind up sucker-punching all of us with “awesomeness” once more. 

04. Stranger by the Lake
Dir. Alain Guiraudie
[Strand Releasing]

Every shot and every conversation in Stranger by the Lake was about boundaries. Alain Guiraudie’s film was set in one location (a gay cruising spot by a lake) that turned out to be a handful of self-governed sections. Each had its own rules and social routines: the parking lot; the rocky slope for platonic friendship; the beach for flirting and ogling; a boundless and undefined green space for sexual release; and the water, a fluid nucleus of peacefulness, erotica, and primal fear. Stranger by the Lake’s calm tone and impressive nature underplayed how rigorously Guiraudie defined and then tested these boundaries, as a group of strangers negotiating similar urges towards friendship, lust, love, and death. Acts of physical boundaries and of social transgression became dangerously, intensely confused, until the film’s simultaneously thrilling and bewildering final scene called the very nature of agency into question. Stranger by the Lake can be read as a landmark film of gay cinema about social dynamics under the constant threat of fatal disease (the film’s mythical lake monster) and police surveillance, but it’s even better as a film about emotional boundaries and the irresistible pull of irrational desires.

03. The Grand Budapest Hotel
Dir. Wes Anderson
[Fox Searchlight]

What’s it gonna take with you people? The “haters,” I mean… I tell you, I’ll bet Busby Berkeley never had to put up with this bullshit (I mean, of course not… no internet). Why, these fine young people went the extra mile to craft for us an extravagant, colorful, fluffy, painstakingly symmetrical piece of entertainment, and yet the roar of hecklers couldn’t be silenced! Wes Anderson is “in a rut,” you say? “Endless daddy issues,” is it? “Shallow,” you think? Guess what, dumb shit: I ain’t listenin’, and neither is Wes Anderson. No matter what you say, he’s gonna keep making these movies, wiping away a single tear with a $100 bill (or color-coordinated handkerchief) every time you talk shit. Taken for what it is (as opposed to limiting it with your expectations or prejudices), The Grand Budapest Hotel was a fine film, funny and huge and full of delicious wonder. Yeah, it was as emotionally ephemeral as most of Anderson’s films, but those mile-a-minute comic speeches and obsessive details cemented in my mind’s eye/ear for some time, and they could for you if you let them.

02. Boyhood
Dir. Richard Linklater
[IFC Films]

I can’t remember who said it, maybe William Gass, but it’s honestly poignant: “Childhood is a lie of poetry.” Memories become like montages: a swift passing of images and feelings, filtered in instagram sepia-tones, and soundtracked appropriately. However, they are sometimes deceptive. Therefore, people support memories with photographs and recordings and films. Further replacing those with the unrelenting preservation of curated selves — memories of ourselves distilled to their allusion. I long to remember myself, even as my memories remain ambiguous, even as each recall is slightly different from the last. So I run along with the deceptions. I tell myself it was different, or could be. In the end, as others have already put it, we scarcely know ourselves. As 2014 comes to a close, and even my most recent memories begin to disintegrate, I remember (I think) the feeling I had as I came home from seeing Boyhood. I kept silent and thought silently for a long time. No film, in recent memory, has made me feel more vulnerable to myself. The aspiring critic in me wants to write — endlessly — my admiration for his film. I want to express the infinite moments that made it a masterpiece. I want to be awed, with everyone else, at the perfect execution. I want to point out, too quickly, its flaws. But the boy in me, whoever he was, has no use for the critic. Somewhere, somehow, in the swirl of experiences I’ve appropriated as my own, I’ve come to touch the heart of the deception. Whatever happened, it’s simply enough to feel its still pounding.

01. Under The Skin
Dir. Jonathan Glazer
[A24 Films]

In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin — a film that many critics described as a tale about inequality in the interpretation of and relations between men and women — was actually primarily exploring symmetry. Two plain, shiney orbs were the first images to appear on screen, moving slowly against a black background, their abstractness eventually forming into an eye. The shapes of primary school geometry have rarely been so impenetrably ominous.

As an alien creature with a human female’s appearance and a world of social knowledge to learn, Scarlett Johansson’s own face often recalled the formally-precise blank space of that opening sequence as she navigated urban Glasgow in a white van, methodically using the language of gender performance as an instrumental device — instead of a universal expression — to ask men for directions, determine if they were alone and vulnerable, and lure them, with the promise of sex, to a house whose interiors resembled an obsidian mining plant in both form and function.

Glazer filmed Johansson unglamorously, emphasizing her body-as-object instead of the aura surrounding it (men and landscapes, too, had pronounced physicality: at one point, Johansson’s sleeping form was superimposed over a forest). The alien protagonist blended into the street scenes of everyday Glasgow and, more importantly, into the film’s stunningly integrated documentary sequences (some of the men who approached her were not actors). The camera turned us into uninvited voyeurs, observing — like she did — ordinary men with detached but intense curiosity: the little ways their clothes didn’t fit right, how flattery made them take up more space. We also observed Johansson as she observed herself: when she stood naked in front of a mirror examining her new body with curiosity and concern, we likewise scrutinized the novelty, deciding what it meant. Her real eyes, audiences might have noticed, were not as centered as the orbs of the opening sequence they echoed.

The men she had captured decomposed into raw materials, while Johannson, having learned too much about society to be able to prey on it, fled. A man in the woods politely determined if she were alone and vulnerable, used a reconfigured combination of her own approach of sex and violence, and after discovering the non-human form lurking underneath, decomposed her into raw material. Through flames, instead of liquid. The film ended with a plume of smoke against a sky that was nearly blank with snow, reminding us, as the film’s introduction did, that in the move from flesh to abstraction, the body gets left behind.

Symmetry is beautiful. Under the Skin, while terrifying, was not an exception, even as it refused to use symmetrical human bodies as shortcuts to beauty, preferring to construct its own. Its narrative circularity; Mica Levi’s haunting, repetitive score; the recurring and prolonged use of the screen as alternately white and black blank space; circles and orbs; the decompositions of bodies — these were the most starkly gorgeous moving images of 2014.

Glazer’s previous films — Sexy Beast, Birth, and some music videos for a band I used to like — were interesting and well executed, but I couldn’t have predicted such an overwhelming and critical statement from him this year. Instead of the long-awaited apex of an artistic trajectory, Under the Skin just appeared here unexplained, much like its protagonist. But unlike her, I’m still trying to learn its alien language, and grateful for the opportunity.